Monday, Monday

Today was a great Monday morning in the Husky Hallways!

We began the first official “classroom” discussion today and laid the groundwork for what promises to be a very busy year! We began by discussing what our binders would look like for this year.  Honors classes will host their binders online this year.  Today I suggested a few websites for them to look at as they begin thinking about this new approach to organization.  (Livebinders, Weebly, Google Sites, Wikispaces, etc)  We also discussed the 10 divider tabs that they will need:

1. RI-Reading: Informational Text
2. RL-Reading: Fiction
3. SL-Speaking & Listening
4. W-Writing
5. L-Language
6. Bellringers
7. Vocabulary
8. Journal
9. Standards
10. Misc

Following that discussion, we looked at the I CAN STATEMENTS for this Unit.  (Unit 1 = The Lighter Side) Students will track their learning this year.  They should know exactly which standards they are currently learning as well as their proficiency level for each.  I will be tracking it as well, and will send a report to parents at a later time.   This painted a pretty clear picture of how much work we have ahead of us for this unit that ends in September.  Students are starting to see the seriousness with the change in curriculum and movement to the Common Core and PARCC assessments.

Vocabulary was supposed to come next.  However, since we had no netbooks and the copy machines were down, we had to just look at the example on the board.  Tomorrow, we are hoping to get that issue solved.

We then took a few minutes to discuss The Lighter Side theme.

We followed our discussion with a tribute to humor via a children’s book.  We watched Tim Tebow read Green Eggs & Ham  from YouTube. Ask you child about the piece of trivia they learned regarding the inspiration behind the book. I DARE you. (hint! hint!)

We then moved into a discussion regarding the parts of speech.   This week our main focus is on nouns and pronouns. After brainstorming definitions, examples, and notes–we watched 2 cute songs for additional help. (Nouns video) (Pronoun video)

We also had a discussion on media/mediums used.  Today we just looked at the definition and examples.  We will go more in-depth with that tomorrow.

Please turn in your $5 student fee as soon as possible so we can start ordering the informational text subscriptions we need for our classes.  Also, for my 5-6 period students-please have your binders here BY WEDNESDAY!!